Personal Science Week - 240215 Bio Age
The Project Blueprint anti-aging fraud and alternatives
We all want to live longer and healthier. Personal scientists tackle this using the tools of science.
This week we look at the Blueprint anti-aging fraud and suggest some alternatives.
Wrecking personal science
We’ve long been skeptical of that longevity “Project Blueprint” from Bryan Johnson, the zillionaire who for the past few years has spent millions on a quest to stop or reverse aging. His basic approach — measure everything, be open-minded and curious — seems right out of the personal science playbook, but the red flag for us came from when he rejected feedback from others. As his Project became better known, several long-time longevity experts reached out with offers to help him — offers he ignored and even blocked. At that point it was clear that this was a publicity stunt. Despite his initial promise to publicize all his data, he hasn’t updated his results since mid-2023 — and the “numbers” he does show are fluffy marketing-speak (“Top 0.2%”) with few absolute values or quantitative time series.
This week Vanity Fair published a lengthy article “Bryan Johnson’s Antiaging Quest Has Made Headlines. But There’s More to His Story” that digs deep into a lawsuit by his former fiancé. Mostly this is nasty allegations about his personal life — from a jilted partner, so take it with due skepticism — but the overall picture is of a narcissist who cares more about himself than about science or truth. Like a previous piece covering Johnson, this one concludes that his “decision to stop eating brownies at night”—not his jargon-laced pseudo-science “is what really transformed his life.”
Ordinarily, we wouldn’t care — what’s one more charlatan in a world full of them? But Blueprint’s publicity and scientistic-sounding language makes it harder for the rest of us who really do care about applying the techniques of science to our personal lives.
Many of us really do want to improve our healthspan. We don’t mind trying new things — and being wrong occasionally — but the goal is finding the truth, not getting on the cover of magazines.
PS: if you like Blueprint, see Michael Lustgarten’s site for much better guidance on longevity optimization tracking. As an MD whose day job includes research relevant to longevity, Dr. Lustgarten has more technical detail and actionable tips, and he’s been watching this space for more than a decade.
Measuring biological age
The biggest problem with longevity projects is how to measure success. One increasingly popular method is the concept of “bio age” — your (presumably) real biological clock, rather than the chronological age that simply measures how many times you’ve circled the sun. One of the original bio age tests relies on the fact that cells have an upper limit in the number of divisions before they die. Presumably your biological age should correspond to how close you are to that limit.
You can buy bio age tests, usually for about $100, that attempt to compare various biomarkers that correlate with aging. I’ve tried a few: one from Viome and another from Trueme Labs; both were roughly similar to my chronological age. (We discussed more details in PS Week 220721).
I’m not convinced that a single number tells you much about your overall “biological age”, even if there is such a concept. As anyone facing a knee or hip “replacement” can tell you, different parts of your body wear out at different rates. It does little good to know that your “overall” bio age is, say, 45, if your heart age is 60. You’ll need your heart, regardless of the health of the rest of you.
A 2023 study led by Stanford researchers used protein markers to compare aging from different body organs. In Nature Are your organs ageing well? The blood holds clues:
The results showed that an organ’s biological age is linked to disease risk. For example, roughly 2% of participants had accelerated heart ageing — that is, their levels of blood proteins relating to heart ageing differed substantially from those of other people of the same age. Having a prematurely old heart was linked to a 250% increased risk of heart failure, the authors found.
Conclusion: maybe someday it will be possible to more accurately test for biological age, but it’ll probably be based on organs rather than a single, overall number.
Daily bio age testing
One problem with most of the bio age tests is that their cost makes it prohibitive for most of us to do the regular (e.g. daily or even hourly) testing you’ll need to rigorously test a specific intervention.
Recently I’ve been testing my own bio age using a new retinal camera (discussed here) that makes it easy to test as often as I want. Your eye socket (also known as the “fundus”) is the only part of the body that exposes both the circulatory and nervous systems at the same time. By comparing my eyes to the millions of others in the camera’s dataset, I’m able to find how similar my retina compares to people at various ages — a rough proxy for my retina’s “age”.
Here’s my data for the past few months, for retinal age as well as two other metrics I track with the camera.
My “retinal age” bounces around my chronological age with no clear patterns. I suppose that’s to be expected: I’d suspect a problem with the algorithm if there were sudden big shifts on a daily basis.
Besides retinal age, the camera also compares my eyes to other health conditions, including cognitive and macular vision risks. I haven’t yet analyzed my results enough to have strong conclusions, though oddly that drop in my “cognitive” score appears to coincide with the beginning of my (very mild) COVID infection (discussed in PS Week 240104). Although the numbers have crept up slowly since then, that big drop seems worthy of further investigation. My retinal age doesn’t seem to be affected much, however.
Stay tuned.
Links worth your time
Speaking of longevity researchers, Andrew Steele (one of the people who was blocked for questioning some of Project Blueprint’s methodology) has an excellent YouTube channel worth viewing. One of his videos is a deep-dive comparing different wearables and concludes that although the results from popular devices like Apple Watch and Oura are roughly accurate, you’re better off using them as comparisons from week-to-week rather than comparing to one another or doing intra-day testing.
Michael Snyder’s lab at Stanford is always seeking recruits for their various studies. If you have a wearable (Apple Watch, Garmin, Oura, etc.) sign up for their latest Infectious Disease and COVID-19 Wearables Study. It’s free and their new app might be able to tell if that scratchy throat is a real infection or just allergies.
And the Eureka Platform from UCSF is another place offering interesting studies, including one for heart health that I signed up for years ago. Depending on the study, they usually give access to your data and I’ve found the investigators very responsive. You can join their study on chronic lower back pain, Parkinson’s Disease, and more. If you or a loved one is a cancer survivor, their Tools to be Fit study will give you a fitness tracker and before/after blood tests.
About Personal Science
Collect your own data, think for yourself, and be skeptical. Those are some of the many characteristics of people who practice science for personal reasons. We try to encourage Personal Science through these weekly updates, but most of our posts are on topics that are mostly timeless, so check out our archives for more information.
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Speaking of longevity and healthspan, I recently read an interesting book called "Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity" by Dr. Peter Attia. He also has a podcast. My biggest stumbling block with Attia's approach is that you really need a cooperative doctor who will work with you to order tests, imaging studies, etc. and monitor your biomarkers. My primary care doc doesn't seem enthusiastic about this kind of stuff. I'm tempted to switch doctors, but it's difficult.